Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr

Nationality

U.S.A.

Date of Birth

1892

Date of Death

1971

Political
Preference

Socialist/Liberal

Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr was an American theologian, pastor and political commentator. Born in Wright City, Missouri, he studied theology at Eden Theological Seminary and Yale University. He was appointed pastor in Detroit in 1915, where he presented himself as a pacifist with strong sympathies for the working class, views that were strengthened during World War I and the 1920s. In the 1930s, his influence as a theologian and political thinker grew, speaking about issues such as Christian ethics, Marxism, and the history of political ideology in the United States. His theological philosophy was always informed by current events and changes in the political climate in his country and abroad: in the 1930s, Niebuhr was a member of the Socialist Party of America and later co-founded the Union for Democratic Action, a pro-union, liberal, interventionist party, in 1941. He supported the American intervention into World War II, and opposed communism as well as the development of Nuclear Weapons during the Cold War. His support for American intervention led to the founding of the Christianity and Crisis magazine which he edited, opposing the non-interventionist rival magazine The Christian Century. In this regard, Niebuhr’s views changed considerably from the 1910s and early 1920s: he now saw pacifism in the face of the evil of Nazism as complacency.

He attended the Oxford Conference on Church, Community and State of the Life and Work movement in 1937. There, he argued for social engagement and justice, combining his call for collective democratic action with a view of human nature based on the concept of human sin. As an ecumenist, Niebuhr was the head of the American Theological Discussion Group that informed the thematic foci of the World Council. When in December 1940 the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America (FCC) organised the formation of the Commission of a Just and Durable Peace, an American commission of ecumenists working on international order, Niebuhr became a member. Together with the British ecumenical Peace Aims Group (PAG), the Commission brought together modern and liberal Protestant views on world politics and peace. Post-war, he was a founding Commissioner of the CCIA, which built on the work the CJDP and PAG had done during the war. Niebuhr’s ideas have been influential both in the field of theological philosophy and action, as well as international relations and global ethics.

In 1948, he was the Chairman of the Third Section of the Amsterdam Assembly on ‘The Church and the Disorder of Society’, where the concept of the ‘responsible society’ was launched to find a middle ground between communism and capitalism. This fitted well with Niebuhr’s political theology, and in his later writings he would show strong support for a united Western Europe of a social democratic nature.